Does sex sell? What do religion and ritual have in common with successful advertising? Can subliminal advertising really influence our behavior? What effect, if any do health warnings on cigarette packs have on the consumer? Martin Lindstrom explains how most are lured to buy, even though they may not even know it. Lindstrom answers the question "Can subliminal advertising really influence our behaviour?". VIEW FROM THE BAY was broadcast live on Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 4:05 PM

Why do we buy what we buy? Find out why some ads and jingles work and others don’t, and the role the subconscious plays in our marketing decisions.Leonard Lopate interviews Martin Lindstrom for the Leonard Lopate Show in New York. Aired the first time nation wide November 12th 2008 at 12.00 PM EST. Click the play button to the right to hear this interview. (If the media player does not show up below, click here to download and play the interview.)

Author Martin Lindstrom sits down with TODAY’s Meredith Vieira to talk about his new book, “Buyology: Truth and Lies About What We Buy,” which explains the scientific reasoning behind purchasing habits.

The most watched morning program in the U.S. goes live with the startling results revealed in Buyology. Watch Martin Lindstrom talk about some of the amazing discoveries from the world’s largest neuromarketing study discovering the truth and lies about why we buy.

THE TODAY SHOW was broadcast live from New York 8:37AM EST on October 20th 2008. Lindstrom will return to Weekend TODAY - this Saturday 25th October 2008 at 9.00AM EST.

Buyology is a page turner writes NEWSWEEK’s Lisa Miller.

Why do you choose Coke over Pepsi, Corona over Bud, Crest over Colgate? You don't think much about these choices, you say; your gut decides. Marketing guru Martin Lindstrom says otherwise.

Your preference for Macs over PCs is embedded in your brain circuitry. In "Buyology," he shares the results of a three-year, $7 million study, in which he submitted 2,000 people to fMRI scans to explore what, exactly, happens in your brain to make you stand in line all night for an iPhone.

The idea: People lie; brain images don't. To create successful brands, companies need to learn what people really want, not what they say they want.

The evidence: Lindstrom tested smokers, some of whom said they heeded the health warnings on cigarette packages. According to fMRI tests, the warnings did not dampen cravings; in fact, they stimulated them.

There's a religious aspect to these brain connections, too. The same areas of the brain "lit up" when people looked at religious symbols—the Virgin Mary, for example—as when they looked at strong brands, like the iPod. Weak brands generated less brain activity.

The conclusion: The most successful brands (Nike, Harley-Davidson) stimulate the brain's emotional centers in a positive way—a lot like religion. They create community, rituals and a common adversary. Coke Zero, says Lindstrom, succeeds because it poses as an enemy to its sugary sibling, Coke.

NEWSWEEK (U.S. edition) On stand October 27th 2008

Once upon a time, the advertising industry treated consumers as a bundle of personality traits (flirtatiousness, prudence, vanity) and products as a bundle of materials (distilled spirits, oils, dyes) put together by factories and laboratories. In short, consumers were people, and products were objects that advertisers tried to present to people in an attractive way. In the 1960s-vintage advertising world conjured up each week on TV's "Mad Men," the holy grail is to hit on slogans like "Bethlehem Steel is the backbone of America" or "Mark Your Man" for a lipstick campaign.

Today's world of marketing, however, reverses this arrangement. Marketers treat commodities as if they were people, with personality traits, and consumers as objects, with attributes that can be technically engineered. Nowhere is this trend more evident than in "neuromarketing," a burgeoning field that Martin Lindstrom explores with impressive clarity -- if undue complacency -- in "Buyology."

Marketers, using magnetic resonance imaging scanners, record brain activity in minute detail, measuring how the products they are selling affect the brain's pleasure centers. Daimler-Chrysler, to take one of Mr. Lindstrom's examples, showed pictures of cars to consumers while using MRIs to study the chemical changes in their brains.

Unexpectedly, when an image of a Mini Cooper passed before their eyes, a "back area of the brain that responds to faces came alive." Turns out it wasn't the Mini Cooper's "ultra rigid body" or "1.6L 16-valve alloy engine" that attracted consumers; it was its irresistible face. "You just wanted to pinch its little fat metallic cheeks," Mr. Lindstrom observes, "and drive away."

Or take another example. Some consumers who prefer Pepsi to Coke when they take a blind taste test, Mr. Lindstrom reports, prefer Coke to Pepsi when they know what they're drinking. A recent MRI test of 67 subjects explains why. Drinking Coke more significantly increases blood flow in the medial prefrontal cortex because its ad campaigns, over the years, have so effectively associated Coke with sensations of warmth, security and childhood innocence. Years ago, Revlon founder Charles Revson drily observed that "in the factory, we make perfume; in the store we sell hope." He was thinking, of course, of the romantic possibilities that Revlon's ads linked with its product. Neuromarketing can now pinpoint where in our brain such hope is triggered and tell a marketer which ad campaign will send the most blood there.

Of course, ad agencies have known for some time that commodities could be marketed as if they were people. By means of a clever campaign, a car or a beer or a chocolate bar can attach itself, in the mind of the consumer, to scenes of rugged adventure or romantic conquest. The buyer, by consuming the product, fills his need not only for a smooth ride or a mellow taste but, transiently, for the heady feeling of bold action or seductive prowess that was once available only through, well, actual experience.

But things have become more complicated. Engineers jostle to see how many needs can be met by a single commodity, such as an iPhone, and advertisers explore how many commodities can be marketed to satisfy a particular need, such as the need to feel like Michael Jordan, who in his prime endorsed everything from breakfast cereals to sports drinks. Neuromarketing takes the project a step further. By tracking brain response, it treats consumers themselves as objects: bundles of nerve centers that respond to different kinds of stimulus and form triggerable pathways as a result.

Mr. Lindstrom sees neuromarketing as a potential generator of vast consumer satisfaction. Aware, though, that the basic idea is unnerving -- there is a "brave new world" aura to such scientific manipulation -- he is keen to show how it sidesteps the ethical critiques that usually beset advertising.

In the old days, marketers were accused of "puffery": purveying falsehoods about the traits of the products they sold, as when Listerine claimed to prevent colds. But when neuromarketers attach personal traits to products, they are not falsely claiming that, say, a Mini Cooper actually is a "gleaming little person." What they are doing is adding a personality of warmth and fuzziness to the car, in the same way that the factory might add ventilated front disc brakes or cruise control. When you drive it, you will genuinely experience the sense of endearment that you might feel when surrounded by adorable children. Sure, it doesn't always work. But the intent is not to deceive.

Similarly, in the old days, marketers were chided for creating false consumer needs: e.g., encouraging the very status anxieties that products would supposedly allay. Think barbecues the size of SUVs. But neuromarketing gets at some kind of objective truth about consumers: about what really gives them pleasure. It makes its pitch directly to needs rooted in the brain's physiology, Mr. Lindstrom says, and so appeals to "our truest selves."

Let us grant that Mr. Lindstrom is right: that neuromarketing avoids portraying a commodity as the kind of object it really is not or encouraging an individual to be the kind of person he really is not. To borrow a couple of terms from the literary critic Lionel Trilling, neuromarketing does not participate in a culture of "insincerity." But it does seem to foster a culture of "inauthenticity": It disrupts identity itself by bypassing the conscious mind and targeting aspects of the self over which none of us has control. By coupling advertising's tendency to humanize commodities and commodify humans, it joins other forces working to erode the authentically human. It fits right in with disturbing contemporary trends, such as the tendency for Internet game-addicts to treat online avatars as more fully human than their own spouses or children. "Mad Men" is a lightly cynical prime-time soap opera. By contrast, "Neuro-Marketing Men," opening in the not-too-distant future at a theater near you, might just be a horror flick.

Mr. Stark is the author of "The Limits of Medicine" (Cambridge, 2006).

This edition of Wall Street Journal was published on 22nd October 2008

T.J. Winick from ABC News questions Martin Lindstrom on subliminal advertising and the true power of sex in ads. Watch the latest interview with Martin Lindstrom live from New York on October 22nd 2008 at 4.06PM EST.

Buy•ology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy By Martin Lindstrom Doubleday; 240 pages

What do Rosary Beads and Red Bull have in common? A lot, it seems. Marketing guru Lindstrom and his team hooked up 65 people to special MRI machines to find out what their brains revealed about the connection between religion and brand loyalty.

For days, the researchers ran images - like those of the Pope and a bottle of Coca-Cola--by the wired subjects. The resulting brain scans were arresting. It turns out that there is virtually no difference between the way the brain reacts to religious icons or figures and powerful brands. Nike is a goddess, after all.

The experiment is quintessential Lindstrom. The author, who spends 300 days a year on the road, teaching major companies how to market their brands, has an original, inquisitive mind. His new book is a fascinating look at how consumers perceive logos, ads, commercials, brands and products. Lindstrom conducted a three-year, $7 million neuromarketing study (sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline and Bertelsmann, among others) that measured the brain activity of 2,000 volunteers from around the world. Some of the results confirmed marketing-industry hunches; others flew in the face of conventional wisdom.

A few findings from the well-traveled savant:

• Product placement on the TV or movie screen is generally useless (unless you are selling it). Viewers tune it out like white noise. It works only when the product is fundamental to the story line.

• Cigarette warning labels not only do not deter smoking but actually encourage smokers to light up. The reason? The nucleus accumbens, or the "craving spot" in the brain, is stimulated by the sight of the warning.

• Is subliminal advertising still used? You bet. There are even stores that play music containing concealed recorded messages prodding shoppers to buy more or not to shoplift.

• Contrary to popular belief, sex usually doesn't sell products. But controversies about sex in ads do (see Calvin Klein or Abercrombie & Fitch).

The author insists he doesn't study buyology, which he defines as "the multitude of subconscious forces that motivate us to buy," to help companies launch nefarious marketing schemes. Rather, he says, "my hope is that the huge majority will wield this same instrument for good: to better understand ourselves--our wants, our drives and our motivations--and use that knowledge for benevolent, and practical, purposes." Well, maybe. But then again, he has nothing to sell us.

TIME published 23rd October at 5.00 PM EST. Time on stand October 28th 2008.

Monday 10th November 2008 Lindstrom's Buyology hit two of the world’s leading best-seller lists: The New York Times Best-seller list as well as the Wall Street Journal Best-seller list.

As per November 10th 2008 Buyology ranked number 3 on the Wall Street Journal list and as per November 16th 2008 Buyology ranked number 11 on The New York Times list.

As per November 5th Buyology as well hit number 2 on Amazon.com - the worlds leading online book-seller. Buyology as well hit several other best-selling lists including USAToday’s best-selling list and Publishers Weekly’s best-seller list.

Picture a mad scientist in his laboratory, cackling with glee as he tries to unlock the secrets of the human mind. Now, consider the unsettling possibility that the scientist may be on to something.

Marketing expert Martin Lindstrom is that scientist, caught up in the excitement of research in his new book, Buyology. Lindstrom first became aware of neurological marketing research through a Forbes magazine article, "In Search of the Buy Button."

The article discussed a lab in England, where a neuroscientist teamed with a market researcher to scan the brainwaves of subjects watching commercials. Lindstrom was thrilled that unbiased access to the consumer brain was finally available.

A difficulty of standard marketing research, Lindstrom says, is that people will not — or cannot — provide accurate information about their mental states.

When asked why they prefer a brand of soft drink, or how a warning label affects them, most people cannot give a straight answer. This, Lindstrom says, is the great advantage of brain waves.

FIND MORE STORIES IN: United States | England | American Idol | Forbes | FedEx | Corona | Guinness | Reese | Casino Royale | Search | Pieces | fMRI | Martin Lindstrom | Magnetic Resonance Imaging

"They don't waver, hold back, equivocate, cave in to peer pressure, conceal their vanity, or say what they think the person across the table wants to hear. … Neuroimaging could uncover truths that a half-century of market research, focus groups and opinion polling couldn't come close to accomplishing."

Two technologies were used in Lindstrom's studies: SST (Steady State Topography) and fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging). In a series of tests spanning three years and more than 2,000 subjects, he concluded:

•Warning labels on cigarettes don't work. They stimulate activity in the part of a smoker's brain linked to cravings.

•Traditional advertisements no longer create lasting impressions. By age 66, most people with a TV will have seen nearly 2 million commercials. That makes it hard for an ad to increase a viewer's memory of a brand, despite the millions spent.

•Product placement only works when fully integrated. It works when Coke-bottle-shaped furniture is part of the set design on American Idol, for example, or when Reese's Pieces candy was used for bait in the movie E.T. However, when a product is not integrated, such as FedEx packages appearing in the background of Casino Royale, there is no measurable effect with regard to viewer recollection of brand.

•Sex sells itself. Viewers of sexually suggestive ads did pay attention, but more to the sex than the ad. In one study, fewer than 1-in-10 men who saw a sexually suggestive ad could recall the product, while twice as many remembered the product in non-sexually suggestive ads.

•Successful branding functions like religion. Simple rituals, such as putting a lime wedge in a Corona or slowly pouring a Guinness, give the brand added cachet. Brands attract zealous followers — "I'm a Mac; I'm a PC." Scans using fMRI technology showed that some viewers had the same neurological response to strong brands that they did to religious iconography.

•Subliminal advertising can be highly effective. When watching an advertisement, viewers automatically raise their guard against its message. With subliminal advertisements, viewers' guards are down, so their responses are more direct.

•Marketing isn't restricted to the visual. Many companies use smells to sell products. Fast-food restaurants and supermarket bakeries use artificial fresh-cooked food smells. Sounds also effect buying. A study showed shoppers purchased French or German wine depending on which nationality's music was playing on store speakers.

Lindstrom's research should be of interest to any company launching a new product or brand. "Eight out of 10 products launched in the United States are destined to fail," Lindstrom writes. "Roughly 21,000 new brands are introduced worldwide per year, yet history tells us that more than 90% of them are gone from the shelf a year later."

It's likely that the information in this book will be used in future marketing campaigns, so even if you aren't in the marketing business, it's a worthwhile read as a measure of self-awareness and self-defense.

USAToday on stand October 27th 2008 worldwide

Buyology is the latest in a clutch of titles examining “econo-science” that also includes the bestsellers Freakonomics, Blink and The Long Tail.

Like these, Lindstrom brings together a great many strands of research to build a fascinating case. The writing is snappy and the book’s a page turner.

BBC Focus Magazine. On Stand November 1st 2008.

New Book From Martin Lindstrom Explores How Subconscious Affects Buying Decisions.

In a bound-to-be-controversial book released today, ad-industry pundit Martin Lindstrom busts commonly held beliefs about marketing, asserting that subliminal advertising does exist and maintaining that cigarette warning labels make consumers want to smoke more, not less.

A major finding in Lindstrom's 'Buyology' is that consumers are driven by not only conscious motivations, but subconscious ones, too.

"Buyology: Truth and Lies About What We Buy," published by Doubleday, lays out the findings of a three-year, $7 million neuromarketing study by Mr. Lindstrom, who is chairman-CEO of Lindstrom Co. He and a team of researchers in Oxford, England, used the most up-to-date neurotechnologies -- functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) -- on 2,000 people from five countries in an effort to better understand consumer behavior. The goal was to gauge the efficacy of product health warnings, product placement and subliminal messaging, among other things.

Beyond rational choice

A major finding is that consumers are driven by not only conscious motivations, but subconscious ones, too. "The majority of the decisions we make every day are basically taking place in the part of the brain where we're not even aware of it," Mr. Lindstrom said. "I really wanted to find out what makes one brand appeal to us. You really can't ask that question to the conscious mind and depend on a verbal answer."

But you can depend on the brain, he said, maintaining that's why neuromarketing, or the study of how the brain responds to marketing stimuli, is here to stay.

Mr. Lindstrom said one of the most surprising findings of the study involved warning labels placed on cigarette packs. When project researchers asked test subjects if the warning labels worked, most said "yes." These were the subjects' conscious answers. But their subconscious answers told a different story. When researchers repeated the same question and flashed images of the labels while subjects underwent an fMRI, the images activated "craving spots" in the brain, indicating that the warnings made the smokers want to smoke more, not less.

In a different study, researchers found that anti-smoking ads had the same counterintuitive effect.

Counterintuive claims

"Buyology" also says that a brand's logo is not as important as many have held it to be; that consumers' sense of sound and smell are more powerful than their sense of sight; and that product placement doesn't always work. For example, when Mr. Lindstrom's researchers analyzed product placements in "American Idol," they found that Coca-Cola was far more effective at captivating consumers than Ford Motor Co., even though the corporations similarly paid more than $26 million on their campaigns.

The reason: The Coke label and colors were continually seen while Ford, which sponsored videos on the show, was less visible and less integrated into the action.

Mr. Lindstrom anticipates that his book will be greeted with mixed reviews. He realizes that people are scared about using neuromarketing, but remains convinced that it can be used in an ethical way. "Neuromarketing is like a hammer," he said. "It depends on whose hand you use and how you use it. You can use it to destroy or hang up a beautiful painting on the wall."

The Advertising Research Foundation declined to comment until it had time to review the book.

Published 21st October 2008.

For years marketers and experts have tried to figure out why we buy what we buy. They’ve spent billions on research, focus groups and advertising trying to find that special “button” of ours they could push to get us to part with our cash.

Now there is a fascinating new book that explains the actual science of why we buy things.

Martin Lindstrom’s book, “BUYOLOGY Truth and Lies About Why We Buy” shatters conventional wisdom and tells us why we really buy certain products or why we’re loyal to certain brands. Lindstrom partnered with researchers at Oxford University to launch the largest neuro-marketing study ever conducted to find out how our unconscious minds influence our buying decisions. At a cost of more than seven million dollars the team monitored more than 2,000 people from all over the world to see how their brains reacted to such things like product placements, subliminal messaging, brand logos, safety warnings and sexy or provocative packaging.

I wanted to know if Lindstrom could apply any of the findings to help explain what is going on right now in the investor’s mind.

Click here to view the CNBC interview with Martin Lindstrom.

First published October 20th 2008 at 4.10PM EST.

It's something that has been talked about for years, and now the author of a new book is trying to explain it: the idea that to many people, Apple is a religion.

In an interview with the creators of the film MacHeads, which itself examines the Apple branding and community phenomena, Buyology author Martin Lindstrom (see video below) talked about just how powerful that brand is.

"Apple is (as we've proven using neuroscience)...a religion," Lindstrom said in the interview. "Not only that--it is a religion based on its communities. Without its core communities, Apple would die--it is already facing strong pressure as the brand simply is becoming too broad (losing) its magic. What's holding it all together is the hundreds if not thousands of communities across the world spreading the passion and creating the myths."

To anyone who has followed Apple over the years, this is not too surprising. But it is interesting that an author like Lindstrom would be willing to codify this in some way.

It would likely be hard for some people, I would think, to be willing to articulate the link between religion and the Apple culture, but as the author points out, there are many similarities, especially when it comes to passion, commitment, and loyalty.

To be sure, there are other brands that have similar followings--but in consumer electronics those names are few and far between. And it often seems as though the Apple fans treat anything that comes out of CEO Steve Jobs' mouth as the true gospel.

I do wonder, of course, as have many others, whether this is a religion that can survive if its leader goes away. In other words, if and when Jobs is no longer at Apple's helm, can anyone step up and be the new prophet? Only time will tell.

This article was posted October 21st 2008 11:19AM.

Getting you to spend your money is among the biggest industries of our time.

Hundreds of billions of dollars each year on advertising and marketing to get you to buy the shiny brand, the new brand, the brand that will make you hot.

Marketing guru Martin Lindstrom has studied how we are sold to and how we respond. He embarked on a $7 million brain scan study to find how advertising effects our subconscious minds.

It led to a book called Buy-ology: How Everything We Believe About Why We Buy Is Wrong.

This interview was broadcast October 23rd 2008 at 8.00PM

When the scientists of the future look back at the advances of recent years, they'll be most impressed by what we've learned about the brain. The incarnate soul has been reduced to an intricate network of cells, speaking an obscure electrical code. The question, of course, is what to do with all this new knowledge.

Doctors hope that it will lead to medical breakthroughs; philosophers are revising old theories of objectivity; political scientists are updating their models of voter behavior. And now, in a turn that's both inevitable and disconcerting, the tools of neuroscience have entered the world of advertising. In "Buy-ology," marketing guru Martin Lindstrom argues that the ad campaigns of the future should tweak their messages to manipulate the brain.

This isn't a new idea. In 1958, he writes, television networks banned subliminal advertising after reports surfaced of movie audiences consuming much more Coca-Cola and popcorn when exposed to fleeting images of "Drink Coca-Cola" and "Eat Popcorn." (The images were reportedly flashed for three-thousandths of a second, far too fast for conscious awareness.) Although the whole thing turned out to be a hoax and subsequent research found that subliminal advertising was rarely effective, the point had been made: The public had been forced to consider the possibility that many of our decisions are shaped by forces beyond our control.

Lindstrom wants to reinvent subliminal advertising for the 21st century, finding new ways to bend the unconscious to the corporate will. The fancy name for this approach is neuromarketing, and he argues that the endeavor is entirely benevolent, just another tool to help us "better understand ourselves - our wants, our drives and our motivations."

It's hard to judge Lindstrom's optimism, since neuromarketing is largely a phenomenon of the private sector, which doesn't publish in peer-reviewed journals. Much of "Buy-ology" is based on brain-scanning research funded by "some of the most respected companies in the world," which paid Lindstrom and colleagues millions of dollars to investigate the effects of advertising on the brain.

If "Buy-ology" itself is any indication, these companies got ripped off. It's not that the book doesn't have interesting moments: I enjoyed learning about how slices of lime got indelibly associated with Corona beer and why the logos plastered on race cars are so effective at getting consumers to buy particular brands. However, what makes these stories interesting is that, unlike the rest of the book, they aren't shackled to pseudoscientific explanations meant to encourage larger advertising budgets.

Take mirror neurons, a much-hyped circuit of cells in the pre-motor cortex. These cells have one very interesting property: They fire both when a person moves and when that person sees someone else move. In other words, they collapse the distinction between seeing and doing. That's an exciting idea, but Lindstrom isn't content to stick with the science. Instead, he uses mirror neurons to explain everything from the atmospherics of an Abercrombie & Fitch store (the "large blow-up posters of half-naked models" make your "mirror neurons fire-up") to the smell of coffee in the morning, which causes these cells to "see a cup of Maxwell-House." Lindstrom cheapens the mirror neuron hypothesis by turning it into a justification for almost every successful marketing campaign: Even the triumph of the iPod is merely mirror neurons at work.

He also oversimplifies his explanations of brain-scanning experiments. He describes his own research in breathless prose as "the largest, most revolutionary neuromarketing experiment in history," but his data rarely hold up to closer examination. For instance, he thinks it's incredibly profound that images of well-known brands, such as Harley-Davidson, trigger the "exact same patterns of brain activity" as does religious iconography.

These data, however, clearly say more about the limitations of brain scanners and Lindstrom's experimental protocol than about brands or God. After all, motorcycles typically trigger very different feelings than pictures of nuns and church pews. If these things all look the same in a scanner, then you've missed something important.

When he's not trying to sell his own research, Lindstrom can be a charming writer. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of advertising history and an abundance of real-world business experience. Unfortunately, in "Buy-ology," he gets seduced by the explanatory power of brain science. Perhaps his next experiment should look at why those pictures of the cortex produced by brain-scanning experiments can make people believe such silly things.

Why one brand takes off and another tanks remains mostly a mystery, with half of new brands and 75% of individual products failing in their first year. That’s frustrating news to the folks that spend more than $117 billion in marketing in $12 billion in market research annually in the U.S.

In Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy, out this week, global branding expert Martin Lindstrom skips consumer surveys and focus groups and instead takes a peek at consumers’ brains. His multi-million dollar “neuromarketing” study, in which magnetic resonance imaging scanners measure brain activity in different areas of the brain in fine detail, is the largest ever conducted. And Lindstrom dishes up the results, alongside a buffet of past research, with clear writing and deft reasoning.

Here, our favorite studies and their big-brand implications:

Mini Cooper’s Unexpected Associations

It’s neither the horsepower nor compact design that most attracts consumers to Daimler-Chrysler’s Mini Cooper. When scientists measured brain activity of people as they looked at images of the Mini, they found an area of the brain that’s stimulated by faces “came alive.” “You just wanted to pinch its little fat metallic cheeks,” writes Lindstrom. And if you’re Daimler-Chrysler, you want to tweak your ads to goose that subconscious link.

Coke’s Emotions vs. Pepsi’s Taste

In a blind taste test more people prefer Pepsi to Coke, but when consumers know what they’re drinking, most prefer Coke. What gives? In addition to the ventral putamen, an area associated with appealing tastes, scientists registered brain activity in the prefrontal cortex when subjects knew they were sipping Coke. It’s an area responsible for higher thinking and it was likely pulling up all sorts of positive memories and associations, “the sheer, inarguable, inexorable, ineluctable, emotional Coke-ness of the brand.” So the “two areas of the brain [engage] in a mutual tug-of-war between rational and emotional thinking” and Coke wins by a landslide.

Nokia, Shhh

To determine if a signature sound—like Microsoft’s start-up musical notes—makes a brand more attractive than an image alone, doctors took fMRIs as people listened to branded noises and watched logos. Several areas in the brain lit up when both were played together, indicating the combination is more pleasant and longer-lasting than either alone. Yet one brand, Nokia, showed almost the opposite effect. A closer look at the ventrolateral prefrontal cortices (part of the brain’s circuits that process emotional information) showed that the ring triggered potent negative associations (a shrill sound in a silent movie theater, perhaps?)—so strong, in fact, that they overrode the positive response people felt when they saw the silent Nokia logo

Published October 23rd 2008 on FastCompany.com

Watch this ultra short interview with Martin Lindstrom on the Weekend TODAY show where he talks about shopping addiction. The interview was broadcasted live from New York Saturday October 25th 2008.

In Lindstrom's Buyology, marketers study brain scans to determine how consumers rate Nokia, Coke, and Ford.

It's a familiar scene if you've ever watched a hospital show. The strapped-down patient is pushed into the narrow tube of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and within minutes doctors scan the inner workings of the brain as they search for tumors or lesions. But could the brain scan perhaps also reveal whether the patient likes a new Nokia (NOK) phone or thrills to the vroom of a Harley-Davidson (HOG)? That's the premise of neuromarketing. It's a hot trend and the subject of Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy by Danish consultant Martin Lindstrom.

Lindstrom tells us early on that his neuromarketing research took three years, spanned much of the globe, and cost millions of dollars. (Eight unnamed corporations picked up the tab.) But the research takes up only a fraction of this uneven and sometimes frustrating book. For many more of its pages, we accompany Lindstrom on a broad tour of marketing. He discusses the sexual appeal of Abercrombie & Fitch's (ANF) pitch, the history of subliminal ads, and the origins of the lime slice in a bottle of Mexican beer. Lindstrom entices us with the research, which seems to explain much about human behavior, but delivers it too sparingly. "Before we get to our fMRI test and its startling results," he writes at one point, "let's do a little mind experiment of our own."

Yet another detour. Still, the research in Buyology points to a vital trend: Marketers are feasting on new streams of customer data. They can track our wanderings on the Internet and our purchases at the supermarket, and they can start to predict an individual's behavior. The brain scans—both an advanced version of the electroencephalograph, which employs wired skullcaps, and the more expensive fMRI—provide rich new data streams. But drawing definitive conclusions from them is not easy.

Scientists have mapped out the regions of the brain that dominate lust, anger, attention, our protective instincts, and much more. But when those regions light up with activity, it's not clear what behavior will follow—or how it may vary from one person to the next. Scientists' understanding of such brain activity is like the early cartographers' grasp of geography.

In one of his most interesting chapters, Lindstrom delves into the value of product placement—the branded phones, laptops, and liquors that share the screen for a precious second or two with movie or TV stars. Such positioning is especially important now that viewers have tools to zap traditional 30-second ads. But does product placement work? Lindstrom's researchers place brain-monitoring caps on viewers watching American Idol and then study their responses to the Cokes the judges sip, the Fords the contestants pile into between acts, and Cingular, the cell-phone service that lets the public vote.

As it turns out, the viewers emerge with far stronger memories of Coke than of Cingular (T). Ford scores worst of all. Lindstrom theorizes that Coke fares better because it insinuates itself into the action. The judges interact with it while they deliberate. Cingular, by contrast, is just a tool for the TV viewers, and Ford is a mere advertisement. In the end, the carmaker doesn't just lose: Its message is annihilated. Viewers seem to remember less about the company after seeing the commercials than before. Lindstrom goes so far as to suggest that the Coke placements push Ford out of people's memories: The automaker spent $26 million in yearly sponsorship only to lose mindshare.

Like much of Buyology, this conclusion is open to debate. Perhaps good feelings about Ford reside deep in viewers' subconscious and will surface months later. Who's to say? Even with the latest technology, much of the activity in the brain remains invisible, or indecipherable, to us.

Take my brain. As I read the last two chapters of Buyology on a train, a chatty couple sits next to me. They talk. Try as I might, I can't help but listen. If I were wearing a wired skullcap, the patterns might suggest that the duo has captured my attention. Does it mean I'm a fan of theirs? Not by any stretch. Is another region in my brain signaling anger or frustration? Is it shining bright? It's tough to translate these brain patterns. But neuromarketers, including Lindstrom, are busy working at it.

BusinessWeek is on newsstands October 31st 2008. Baker is a senior writer for BusinessWeek in New York.

‘Neuromarketing’ is the wave of the future, says a fast-talking adman

Danish marketing guru Martin Lindstrom’s Buyology is about why, neurologically speaking, we buy some things and not others, leading some brands to fail while others conquer the known universe. Mr. Lindstrom reminds us throughout that he’s advised international corporations on the selling of everything from feminine hygiene products to sore-throat lozenges, so it’s perhaps to be expected that he expends considerable ink selling his book, too, even as he writes it. His is “the largest, most revolutionary neuromarketing experiment in history,” he boasts—a project he hopes will “sculpt the future of advertising” and “revolutionize the way all of us think and behave as consumers.”

Well, not quite. Mr. Lindstrom has some interesting things to say about what attracts us to iPods over PCs, but he doesn’t sound particularly revolutionary or even scientific. Actually, he sounds like someone giving a Power Point presentation in a 10th-floor conference room, with a spread of stale sandwiches off to one side. He favors a casual, snappy vernacular—peppy—as though he were trying to keep us from nodding off. He uses words like “heck” and starts sentences with “Point is …” At one point he admits that “the notion of a science that can peer into the human mind gives a lot of people the willies.” One can imagine a mesmerized audience of eager M.B.A. students.

The author’s basic premise is that as consumers, we are at a loss to explain our purchasing decisions—unaware, for example, that we bought the new iPod because it was so cool-looking we thought merely owning it would get us laid, thereby increasing our reproductive advantage. Only the brain itself can reveal that our visit to the Apple Store was actually a matter of survival of the fittest (meaning we should all buy more iPods immediately), so Mr. Lindstrom set out to “interview” our gray matter. He submitted 2,081 volunteers to machines like the fMRI and the SST (which measures electrical activity inside the brain). He calls his research “neuromarketing,” because it blends science and marketing.

“Market research” and focus groups are dead, he proclaims. Companies are wasting millions of dollars on ads that either don’t work or are turning customers off. Anyone who wasn’t raised on TiVo is bound to agree.

Mr. Lindstrom boldly asserts that car commercials are ineffective because they’re all basically the same and don’t engage us emotionally. He also lets us know that “for its millions of fervent constituents, Apple wasn’t just a brand, it was a religion.” And product placement in movies only works if the product in question is an integral, seamless part of the story, like the Ray-Ban Wayfarers in Risky Business. On the other hand, cigarette warning labels actually enhance cigarette sales, as they stimulate an area of the brain called the “craving spot.” Of course, smokers don’t realize this, which is why Mr. Lindstrom believes we need to scan their brains to find out why they insist on killing themselves. (And, less pressingly, to find out whether we think the ubiquitous Nokia phone ring is annoying. We do.)

He also proclaims, rather grandly, that “by uncovering the brain’s deepest secrets, I wasn’t interested in helping companies manipulate consumers—far from it.” But though he displays genuine ire at the sinister-yet-genius marketing tactics of cigarette companies (which are by his account the most evolved marketers on the planet), he cops to giving hens in Saudi Arabia a “vitamin” to make their egg yolks a more pleasing color of yellow. In other words, it’s a fine line.

Mr. Lindstrom says his research cost $7 million and consumed seven years of his life. He adds, without further explanation, that it was sponsored by eight multinational corporations. (He identifies them in the acknowledgements; they include Glaxo-Smithkline.)

So much for his consumer advocate’s credentials. This is a business book.

NOT THAT THERE ISN'T some amusing trivia in Buyology for the casual reader. For example: Did you know Steven Spielberg initially approached M&M’s about being in E.T., and only when they refused did he seek out Reese’s Pieces, causing sales of the candy to triple in the week after the movie’s debut? Or that Bang & Olufsen remote controls are “stuffed with a completely useless wad of aluminum” to make them feel heavy and expensive?

We’re also given a peek into the crystal ball. Martin Lindstrom predicts where the new technology will take us: “Although using brain-scanning technology to sway political decisions is in its infancy, I predict that the 2008 presidential showdown will be the last-ever election to be governed by traditional surveys, and that by 2012, neuroscience will begin to dominate all election predictions.” In other words, no more talk of the “Bradley effect.” Pollsters will just interview our brains to find out whom we’ll be voting for!

Observer is on newsstands October 30th 2008. Meredith Bryan is a reporter at The Observer New York.

Brand surgery

As long as anyone can remember, marketers have been dying to get inside our heads. What if they really could?

They were so certain they had a winner. In the early 1980s, Coca-Cola spent $4 million conducting nearly 200,000 taste tests and interviews in an attempt to gauge consumer reaction to a sweeter formulation of its century-old soft drink. The data was unequivocal: Consumers preferred the new formula 8% more than Pepsi and an astonishing 20% more than the original Coca-Cola recipe. But none of that would matter. People simply didn't want New Coke, and the resulting product quickly became the greatest marketing disaster of all time. Company president Donald Keogh summed it up thusly: "All the time and money and skill poured into consumer research on the new Coca-Cola could not measure or reveal the deep and abiding emotional attachment to the original Coca-Cola felt by so many people."

That emotional attachment we feel toward certain products and brands is something marketers are dying to understand. They're forever trying to get inside our heads, and they've recently turned to neuroscience for help. Researchers dabbling in "neuromarketing" make use of technology like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to delve into our minds like never before. It works like this: By measuring blood flow at more than 100,000 locations in the brain and watching the output on an fMRI scanner, scientists can get a pretty good idea of how your brain is processing information. Just last year, a team from MIT, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon made a real breakthrough when they were able to correctly predict which combinations of products and prices would get their subjects to buy a product. All they had to do was watch a group of neurons in the forebrain called the nucleus accumbens (the same portion of the brain that gets turned on when we anticipate a financial gain) and wait for them to light up on the scanner.

A few companies had already been experimenting with this technology. In 2002, scientists working for DaimlerChrysler found that fMRIs could give them a better understanding of how men reacted to cars. In one study, subjects were presented with images of car grilles, and a part of their brains called the fusiform face area (the portion of the temporal lobe that allows us to recognize faces) was triggered. It was later hypothesized that one of the reasons BMW's Mini Cooper had been selling so well was that, at least subconsciously, it had an "adorable face." Furthermore, when drivers were shown pictures of high-performance cars, particularly the Ferrari 360 Modena and the BMW Z8, the areas of the brain associated with concepts of wealth and social dominance were excited. No focus group or survey could ever pick up such a pure and unguarded emotional response.

Martin Lindstrom has spent most of the last 20 years travelling the globe, helping steer the course of such brands as Disney, Pepsi, McDonald's and American Express. According to him, the problem with traditional market research (that is, surveys) is that it relies on people being honest and accurate in their answers. Why would people lie? Any number of reasons. They may be attempting to appear more affluent, cultured or educated than they really are. They may be trying to please or impress the researcher by giving what they believe to be a "correct" answer, or, quite possibly, they are simply unable to articulate how they really feel about a product.

"Surveys and focus groups force people to pass everything they think and feel through a rational verbalization filter," says Lindstrom. "Neuromarketing taps into the 85% of our mind that is unconscious. Try asking someone: Why do you love your wife? Give me three bullet-point answers. It's ridiculous. Yet that is exactly what we're doing when we ask people why they love their iPod."

In 2004, Lindstrom directed the largest neuromarketing study ever conducted. The project lasted three years and involved the work of 200 researchers, 10 professors, and over 2,000 subjects in the U.S., England, Germany, Japan and China who volunteered to have their brains scanned. Lindstrom outlines the results of this study in his book, Buyology, released earlier this month. One of the most fascinating chapters details an experiment that underscores just how powerful some brands have become. A group of people who deem themselves devout were shown a series of religious symbols as well as a number of consumer products, ranging from pints of Guinness to Harley-Davidson motorcycles. The products of particularly powerful brands, researchers noted, lit up the same areas of the brain--just as strongly--as the images of crosses, rosary beads, Mother Teresa, the Virgin Mary and the Bible.

The chances that a machine could help a company make a product so good and so satisfying that using it becomes a quasi-religious experience are slim. Still, there are some who feel that having this much insight into the way we think is simply too much power to put in the hands of marketers. CommercialAlert, the consumer protection organization founded by Ralph Nader, calls neuromarketing "Orwellian" and claims that it will lead to ever more marketing-related diseases such as obesity, diabetes and alcoholism. They find it offensive that one of the world's greatest medical inventions is being used to sell goods, rather than help people.

Martin Lindstrom is unwilling to cede the moral high ground. In his book's introduction, he writes, "The more companies know about our subconscious needs and desires, the more useful, meaningful products they will bring to market. ...Imagine more products that earn more money and satisfy customers at the same time. That's a nice combo." Neuromarketing isn't mind control; it's market research, and it remains to be seen whether it can help companies avoid disasters like New Coke in the future. After all, the functional MRI is merely a descriptive technology. It's like the difference between a weather map and a climate model: The map can tell you where it's raining, but not why it rains. And that's not going to change any time soon. The brain is still a far more complicated machine than we understand.

The Globe & Mail went on newsstand October 31st 2008

Martin Lindstrom, the boy wonder of branding, tells that the future of shopping is all in the mind.

Martin Lindstrom, a 38-year-old advertising sage, is unusual in his profession for openly loathing the tobacco industry. Which is a shame because it just adores him. Fourteen times in the past two years the cigarette giants have come knocking on his door to beg for his services.

Why? Because Lindstrom, a pint-sized Dane with a curiously high-pitched voice, has the power to make us smoke. His tool is neuro-marketing — or looking directly into our brains — a practice that has hitherto been viewed as bordering on the unethical. Now, with the credit crunch beginning to bite, it increasingly looks like a necessary corporate survival tactic.

The branding guru and futurologist has just published Buyology: How Everything We Believe About Why We Buy is Wrong — based on his four-year £1m worldwide probe into our grey matter. Rigged up to fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imagers) scanners, his subjects have images of chocolate bars and fag packets flashed before their eyes while Lindstrom and his team observe how various parts of their brains light up in response. What he has proved is that our subconscious does most of the decision-making.

“We should not fool ourselves into thinking that we’re in control — we’re not,” he says. “In fact, the more rational a person believes himself to be, the less likely that he will be in control of his choices.”

Do you, for example, prefer the taste of Pepsi but always buy Coke? Or swear blind that you’ll vote Conservative but opt for Labour on election day? Lindstrom — and his scanner — can tell you why. (More worryingly, he can use the information to push your “buy buttons” for the companies that hire him.)

Having set up his first advertising agency at 12 (it defies belief, but he had both employees and clients), he now travels round the world 300 days of the year and is paid millions to dispense his advice to Disney, Nestlé and Microsoft. But Philip Morris or Imperial Tobacco? He tells them to sod off — “Basically because I don’t like smoking,” he tells me when I catch up with him in Zurich. Just as well: in the wrong hands his expertise could be devastating.

One of Lindstrom’s studies, conducted in Britain, attempted to explain why the number of smokers has gone up since the ban on advertising and the introduction of health warnings on cigarette packets. When he showed his test subjects pictures of cigarettes, their nucleus accumbens — the area of the brain that deals with addiction and reward — predictably started to buzz. Then he showed them anti-smoking messages — and they provoked the same cravings.

Apparently, when faced with the message “Smoking kills”, our subconscious just cuts straight to the craving. “Most anti-smoking messages,” he concludes, “are no better than adverts for cigarettes.”

Equally disturbing, Lindstrom has discovered that addicts get a craving even when shown simple images of Ferraris or cowboys. Indeed, Philip Morris has already begun to use this technique — paying some bar owners, for example, to kit out rooms in the colours of its Marlboro brand, with furniture suggestive of the packet design and televisions running landscapes of cowboy country on a loop.

In another study, the most potent brain zone for consumer motivation was the amygdala, where we register fear, anxiety and dread. It’s particularly useful for political campaigns and, if you hit it right, as the Conservative party did in 1979 with its “Labour isn’t working” slogan, it will wipe out all the nuances of debate and get you elected.

Within five years, Lindstrom estimates, a quarter of the money that UK advertisers spend on research — some £250m annually — will be spent on neuro-marketing. The sinister element is that once a company or political party understands your subconscious better than you do, you can be manipulated.

Lindstrom’s critics call his work “Orwellian”; even he concedes that it’s a thorny area: “The reason why neuro-marketing has not kicked in before is because, from an ethical point of view, companies have not wanted to go there. But I wanted to find out how far we can go.”

How far is that exactly? “We cannot go as far as we fear. We cannot — thank God — brainwash consumers, plant a ‘buy’ button in people’s brains. What we can do is look into our subconscious mind and see what affects us and how strongly.” And then use that to target sales? “Well, yes . . .”

One of the key reasons humans are such mad shoppers is dopamine, a euphoria-inducing hormone released by the brain that induces a feeling of security and self-righteousness when we hand over a credit card. Lindstrom pinpoints it as the reason people were happy to borrow four times their salaries to buy houses or stick £900 handbags on a store card. He even says that stockbrokers were chasing a dopamine high when trading, pushing stocks up and up. Greed was our addiction; looming recession is our self-induced come-down.

That does not mean we’ll give up all our dopamine highs. The luxury-goods market will fall, he predicts, but sales of fast food will go up; we’ll take fewer holidays but spend more on televisions, DVDs (particularly romantic comedies) and nostalgia items such as flowery aprons and board games (like Scrabble) because they remind us of childhood and help us to feel cosy and secure as the world crumbles.

How are the big brands going to sell to us? This is where, frankly, we should be a little afraid. For a start, our relationships with some brands are more intense than we realise. In 2006 nuns of various ages were put under an fMRI scanner and asked for their fondest memories of God. Unsurprisingly, the caudate nucleus (joy, serenity, self-awareness) and insula (which apparently registers a feeling of being linked to the divine) both lit up like Christmas trees.

This pattern was thought to be unique to religion — until last year, when Lindstrom saw his subjects’ brains respond in the same way to brand logos such as Harley-Davidson, Guinness and Apple.

That shopping is the new religion is a creaky old cliché. “Now it seems more like scientific fact,” he says. Armed with a scanner and a test group, a corporation can begin to devise sales pitches that light up your “God buttons” and “buy buttons” simultaneously.

One of the best examples is Coca-Cola. For years it was not understood why tasters said they preferred Pepsi to Coke but then bought Coke. Lindstrom cites an fMRI study showing that Pepsi activates the ventral putamen in the majority of consumers, which gets stimulated when we find tastes appealing. But with Coke there is additional activity in the medial prefrontal cortex — the region dedicated to higher thinking and discernment. One sip and our brains flood with memories of happy childhoods and Christmas.

With a better understanding of its brand’s pull, Coca-Cola can get more creative in how to grab us. Indeed, Lindstrom conducted a test in the United States to prove how effective product placement can be.

Along with Ford and AT&T, the mobile phone company, Coca-Cola is one of three principal sponsors of American Idol, the country’s top-rated TV show. While the firms each pay more than $30m annually to run advertisements around the programme, Coca-Cola has woven itself into the action.

Simon Cowell sits at his judging table sipping Coke, and the firm’s signature red is embedded in the set design. The result? No one remembers Ford after the show — we switch off when we are being “advertised” to — but our yearning for a hit of sugary caffeine is sky high.

To be fair, this kind of advertising has been around since MGM movie stars were paid to smoke specific cigarette brands on screen in the 1930s. But it is set to rise exponentially. In 20 years, Lindstrom suggests, Piccadilly Circus in London could be free from neon billboards: “Instead, the streets will be awash with smells and sounds. A whiff of lemon from a store selling a must-have training shoe, clingy perfume wafting from the doors of a hotel.” We already know that fast-food restaurants pump out artificial scents, but the trend is set to rise.

The fear button is also going to prove key. Previously we were sold organic and environmentally friendly products on the basis of their homespun natural goodness. Now that we’re less inclined to put our hands in our pockets for the feelgood factor, brands will resort to scaring us. “They will tell you to buy an energy-saving light bulb if you want your children to have any quality of life,” says Lindstrom.

Within a few years, he predicts, brain-mapping our political desires will be commonplace, too. Who, I ask, does he neuro-instinctively think will win the US election?

“Hate it or love it, McCain could still win. First, a lot of votingis taking place in the churches. If there is a large cross hanging over you while you vote, you may not register it but it will have an influence on you to vote Republican.

“Second, we have done some studies that show some people, sadly, are non-verbally hard-wired to think that a black face is bad and a white face is good.

"Obama will need his big lead, because there will be a substantial subconscious swing to McCain on election day.”

What does he make of Gordon Brown’s plight?

“He is a little bit more appealing to people in a crisis. He’s like Winston Churchill in a way, though the British people didn’t want Churchill once the war was over.”

If Brown hired him, Lindstrom would hook up the brains of a test group to a scanner, bombard them with images of Churchill and see what lobes lit up: “Then we’d build a message based on whether we want Brown to scare us, be confident or to emotionally engage us. Maybe he doesn’t know himself right now.”

With nine volunteers and two fMRI machines, Lindstrom claims he definitely would know — and he would be able to advise Brown exactly which of our buttons to press.

Sunday Times on newsstands November 2nd 2008.

What - exactly - were you thinking?

You bought that latest gadget, the whoozit, a thingamajig, that whatchamacallit, knowing full well you didn't need it. You have one already, equally useless.

It was fun to plunk down money when you bought it, but now you're wondering: What you were thinking?

In a way, you weren't. Your emotions overrode your thoughts, which means the gadget's seller did his homework.

Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy, by Martin Lindstrom; c.2008, Doubleday; $27.95; 256 pages.

Hmm. Can that research help your business? Maybe. Read more in Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy, by Martin Lindstrom, the new book about the newest science.

We are a society of shoppers, Lindstrom points out in the beginning of this fascinating study. It's a rare day that we don't buy something, even if it's coffee or a soda from a vending machine. But when you bought that java or the cola, why did you choose the brand you drank?

Researchers know why. While you're doing business, drinking cola, and shopping till you're dropping, laboratory volunteers are wearing swimcap-like devices and subjecting themselves to brain scans. The scans tell researchers what products and commercials delight volunteers' brains. Data also indicates what turns consumers off.

Emotions, as it turns out, will win a buyer over every time, Lindstrom says, which happens long before any conscious decision is reached. Before you've made a thoughtful and (you think) careful buying decision, your brain has practically paid for the purchase. Lindstrom calls it your "buyology."

So how can this intriguing new science help your business?

Because we're inundated by ads, you want your message to stand out. Lindstrom says product placement needs careful consideration; the wrong use of placement may actually weaken consumer recall. Getting people to think about using your product is key because of "mirror neurons.

If they imagine using the product, their brains are tricked into believing it's a done deal.

Lindstrom discusses the use of subliminal advertising (despite the furore of years past, it happens); why logos often don't work but "gimmicky" ads sometimes do; how memories are made; why smart marketers prefer to advertise to your nose; the reason traditional research often yields wrong results; and how, in the future, political campaigns may be run by neuroscience.

When someone tells you that a book is a "page-turner," you probably think of the latest top-list best-seller. Now you'll think of Buyology.

Author Martin Lindstrom is fun and lighthearted, but his research (expensive, as you can imagine, but funded by various entities) is hard-core. It seemed to me that every page has three or four AHA! moments on it, all of which can only make your ad dollars work better and may help your sales team in the field.

The last book I read that was this intriguing was, I think, Why We Buy, by the brilliant researcher Paco Underhill. I'm sure it's no accident that Underhill wrote the foreword here.

Pick up a copy of this book and get one of those highlighting thingamajiggies before you fix your ad budget for the new year. Buyology is definitely money well spent.

Business Edge is on stand 31st Octobe 2008

What — exactly — were you thinking?

You bought that latest gadget, the whoozit, a thingamajig, that whatchamacallit, knowing full well you didn't need it. You have one already, equally useless.

It was fun to plunk down money when you bought it, but now you're wondering: what you were thinking?

In a way, you weren't. Your emotions overrode your thoughts, which means the gadget's seller did his homework.

Hmm. Can that research help your business?

Maybe. Read more in "Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy" by Martin Lindstrom, the new book about the newest science.

We are a society of shoppers, Lindstrom points out in the beginning of this fascinating study. It's a rare day that we don't buy something, even if it's coffee or a soda from a vending machine. But when you bought that java or the cola, why did you choose the brand you did?

Researchers know why. While you're doing business, drinking cola, and shopping till you're dropping, laboratory volunteers are wearing swim-cap-like devices and subjecting themselves to brain scans. The scans tell researchers what products and commercials delight the volunteers' brains. Data also indicates what turns consumers off.

Emotions, as it turns out, will win a buyer over every time, Lindstrom says, which happens long before any conscious decision is reached. Before you've made a thoughtful and (you think) careful buying decision, your brain has practically paid for the purchase. Lindstrom calls it your "Buyology."

So how can this intriguing new science help your business?

Because we're inundated by ads, you want your message to stand out. Lindstrom says product placement needs careful consideration; the wrong use of placement may actually weaken consumer recall. Getting people to think about using your product is key because of "mirror neurons." If they imagine using the product, their brains are tricked into believing it's a done deal.

Lindstrom discusses the use of subliminal advertising (despite the furor of years past, it happens); why logos often don't work, but "gimmicky" ads sometimes do; how memories are made; why smart marketers prefer to advertise to your nose; the reason traditional research often yields wrong results; and how, in the future, political campaigns may be run by neuroscience.

When someone tells you a book is a "page-turner," you probably think of the latest best-seller. Now you'll think of "Buyology."

Author Martin Lindstrom is fun and lighthearted, but his research (expensive, as you can imagine, but funded by various entities) is hard-core. It seemed to me that every page had three or four "Aha!" moments on it, all of which can only make your advertising dollars work better and help your sales team in the field.

The last book I read that was this intriguing was, I think, "Why We Buy" by the brilliant researcher, Paco Underhill. I'm sure it's no accident that Underhill wrote the foreword here.

Pick up a copy of this book and get one of those highlighting thingamajiggies before you fix your ad budget for the new year. "Buyology" is definitely money well-spent.

Terri Schlichenmeyer reviews books for the Sunday Eagle-Tribune - on newsstands November 2nd 2008.

IF ADVERTISERS CONTINUE to pare their spending as the economy slows, they'll have to learn how to do more with less. In Martin Lindstrom's new book Buyology, the marketing guru tries to get to the bottom of what works and what doesn't by using scientific studies to observe buyer behavior 90% of which he says is driven by our unconscious minds.

COCKTAIL PARTY FODDER: In one of Lindstrom's studies, smokers linked to an MRI machine first looked at images associated with different cigarette brands cowboys, camels and then at logos of actual cigarette companies. The subjects' brains responded more strongly to the symbolic images than to the others, suggesting logos aren't necessarily marketers' most powerful tools.

Also: Lindstrom gave Tiffany's boxes to 600 women and found their heart rates went up 20% when they received them. One look at its distinctive robin's-egg blue color, Lindstrom found, triggered thoughts and anxiety about marriage, weddings, and raising a family.

FORTUNE is on news-stands November 24, 2008

When he was walking around Tokyo’s Shibuya district this year, marketing consultant Martin Lindstrom got a text message from Starbucks on his cell phone saying, “Martin, one of your friends is in the area. Would you like to meet him?”

After failing to spot anyone familiar, Lindstrom responded that he would like to meet the friend. Starbucks answered, telling him, “Starbucks would like to sponsor your meeting. He is at the nearest Starbucks, one-and-a-half minutes away and we’ll give you a free cup of coffee.” When Lindstrom arrived at the coffee shop, his friend was indeed waiting. “I didn’t know he was in town,” he recalled. Both had signed up for track-a-friend connections.

It’s this kind of product placement — contextual product placement “where the brand helps me to become a hero” — that is likely to emerge as the “number-one marketing tool” inside 10 years, predicted Lindstrom, author of newly published “Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy” (Doubleday, $24.95).

If things unfold the way the 38-year-old, globe-trotting native of Copenhagen anticipates, the marketing landscape worldwide will have changed significantly. Lindstrom pans product placement as the least effective form of marketing, working about 1 percent of the time. “We are hardwired to be seduced by stories,” he said, noting our brains “filter” out brand images that are randomly or commercially dropped into a story where they play no role. “What does the brain say about that? It says, ‘Forget about that. It’s destroying my story line and I can’t cope.’”

Most of this could be happening without our even knowing about it. Based on his research for “Buyology” — functional MRI- and EEG-like brain scans of what stimulates craving, status seeking and other responses in 2,000 people — Lindstrom contends that 85 percent of what we do is prompted by subconscious triggers. While we may think we’ve bought a shirt or gone to a concert for one reason or another, the author suggests otherwise. “It’s not that we mean to lie — it’s just that our unconscious minds are a lot better interpreting our behavior [including why we buy],” he writes.

Though marketing to evoke particular brain responses may elicit images of the thought police, the way Lindstrom sees it, his findings mean that roughly 85 percent of marketing money is being wasted. Last year, that amounted to about $99 billion of the $117 billion he estimates was spent on marketing products in the U.S., including advertising, packaging and displays. He would also throw in another $10 billion wasted on the market research.

What is working is advertising of the subliminal variety. “Subliminal advertising, hate it or love it, is much more powerful than anything else I’ve seen,” Lindstrom said. “It is probably the reason we have 17 million shopaholics in [the U.S.]. People have built whole lives around the entertainment of shopping, rather than entertaining themselves.”

With mirror neurons that incline us to mimic the actions of others, and the feel-good dopamine rush that accompanies buying something, consumers may be easy marks for marketers that can play to those impulses.

Take Abercrombie & Fitch, for example. “As the clerk rings up and bags your purchases in that beautiful black-and-white Abercrombie bag tattooed with bare-chested models, you’re feeling cool, you’re feeling gorgeous — you’re feeling like one of ‘them,’” Lindstrom wrote in his book. “[This] produces a feeling the brain automatically links back to the models [hired to hang out] outside, the fragrant and pervasive smell, and the late-night atmosphere of the store itself….You’re taking home a little bit of that popularity with you.”

Or, at the least, one’s nucleus accumbens — the “craving spot” around the head’s temple — may have been triggered. The author-consultant himself believes he has experienced this. While tooling around in the Second Life Web site one evening, he saw a Pizza Hut storefront with a sun rising behind it appear in the virtual community on his computer screen. The dawn of a new day? No, simply a pizza promptly ordered by Lindstrom and delivered to his home, about a half hour later.

WWD is on news-stands November 12th 2008.

Sales aren't the only strategy used by retailers to get shoppers to spend. "They have some tricks up their sleeves which are pretty interesting," says Martin Lindstrom, who researched the various ways retailers manipulate us. Below, he reveals the tricks of the trade and offers his advice on how to resist such schemes this season.

LEAVE THE KIDS AT HOME

"The retailer will work on a technique which is very cute: ‘Bring the children with you out shopping,'" warns Lindstrom. "‘We have Santa Claus. We have special play tables for the kids. Enjoy the time while it lasts because you don't spend enough time with your kids.' They're working the guilt factor. When you walk around in the supermarket or the department store and little Peter's with you and he wants to have that video game or candy, you're going to put it in the basket. And that, we know from research, can increase purchases by about 20%."

DON'T FALL FOR DEMOS

Beware of in-store cooking lessons, advising sessions or clinics. "The first thing you'll see is they will create a lot of events in stores because that's how they get people to come inside," Lindstrom says. "If they manage to get customers behind their doors, chances of persuading them to buy is so much higher."

BE AWARE OF SEDUCTIVE SCENTS AND SOUNDS

"There will be beautiful smells of cookies being baked and those type of holiday treats," says Lindstrom. "We know from the ‘Buyology' study that if you pump in smells in the retail stores, it makes people buy up to 29% more. Sound is going to be very prominent — believe it or not. We observed an amazing experiment conducted a couple of months ago with French, Italian and American wines. They started to play French music — very subtle — and the sales of French wine skyrocketed, up to 45%."

CHOOSE A SMALL SHOPPING CART

"Shopping baskets are going to increase in size," Lindstrom says. "Our studies show that the bigger basket you have, the more you spend. We also noted that if a basket is double the size, you are actually increasing your purchase by up to 30%."

WRITE A SHOPPING LIST

"Nail down everything you're planning to buy that you need," Lindstrom advises. "Make it very detailed. Also, put brand names on it — and not the expensive brand names. When you make a list, you're saving up to 40%-50%, because that means you're not being inspired, and inspiration is what retail is all about. That's the way we catch people."

NEVER SHOP HUNGRY

"Retailers are going to put up specials from 10 to 12 in the morning and from 5-7 in the evening," Lindstrom says. "Because you're hungry during that period. And we do know that if you're very hungry, you'll actually buy more — not just food, but everything. This is a way for us to fulfill the hungry feeling in our stomach. We know if you're hungry, you're likely to buy 18% more. Eat before you go out."

New York Times on stands November 9th 2008

Marketing expert Martin Lindstrom says stores have special ways to get shopppers to spend. Kai Ryssdal gets him to reveal some of their methods.

Kai Ryssdal: When the economy slows, consumers predictably start changing their behavior -- trying to be more thrifty and less impulsive. Just as predictably, stores change their tactics to try to get around those good intentions. Often, they do it in ways we're not aware of, not even at a physiological level. It's a technique called neuromarketing.

In his new book, "Buyology" -- that's B-U-Y-ology -- marketing expert Martin Lindstrom explores what makes shoppers tick deep down. We met up at a new mall here in Los Angeles to find out how retailers hit and sometimes miss the mark.

Martin Lindstrom: We're just pausing by the Barnes & Noble store right now, and as you can see they have a nice island in there . . .

Ryssdal: Yup.

Lindstrom: . . . in the middle of the store promoting books. Now, does that work or not, do you think?

Ryssdal: I don't know. I mean, I love books, so it works for me. Maybe not everybody, though.

Lindstrom: We did an experiment with chocolate. We offered women a box of chocolate with 30 pieces in it. We said to them, "Take as much as you want." Guess what? They took one piece. Then we gave them a box of chocolate with only six pieces in it. We said, "Take as much as you want." They took three pieces. What we have learned is less is better than more.

Ryssdal: When you did this study and this research, did you actually put people in MRI machines and do the brain scans?

Lindstrom: We did. And we did it with a lot of peole. We had over 2,000 consumers' brains we were scanning across from five countires. And we needed to use that when it came to smoking to subliminal advertising and to the influences of our senses, because we know those factors are ingrained into our brain and we cannot verbalize it, so we had to use brain slides to find out the answers .

Ryssdal: This is about so much more than branding and consumer experience, isn't it?

Lindstrom: It is. This is about our life, because . . . I just noticed when we met up, Kai, that you were holding a Starbucks coffee cup in your hand.

Ryssdal: Guilty.

Lindstrom: Why do you do that?

Ryssdal: Because I needed a cup of coffee. It's been a long day.

Lindstrom: Yeah, and it's a ritual.

Ryssdal: And you know what's funny is I walked by two or three other coffee places on the way to Starbucks.

Lindstrom: But you bypass the . . .

Ryssdal: But I bought the Starbucks, yeah.

Lindstrom: So what's interesting is that, first of all, it's a ritual. You walk to work, right, and you have to have it there. And I'll bet you, if one day you do not have that in your hand, guess what? You're whole morning is destroyed, right.

Ryssdal: That is true.

Lindstrom: Secondly, what's interesting is the tactile sensation you have on that cup. You know this little cardboard they have around.

Ryssdal: Right. Yeah.

Lindstrom: In fact, we remove that for fun sometimes. And people did not feel the coffee tasting as well any more, becauses the tactile sensation is programming our brain to think it tastes better.

Ryssdal: So, let's do the consumer advocate thing, here, and tell me how we as consumers can be smart to all this, other than buying and reading your book.

Lindstrom: [laughs] Well, you know, I think No. 1 point is: skip the shopping trolley. You know I was in Woolworth the other day and I'd been into Whole Foods the other day, and those brands are actually increasing the size of the shopping baskets right now. In fact, Whole Foods basket is now double the size as it was last year. You know why? Because if it's double the size, you buy 30 percent more products. And you do that because you look down into this huge basket in Wal-Mart, for example, and there's five products down there and . . . "Oh, I haven't bought anything," right.

Ryssdal: Right.

Lindstrom: Well, guess what? You [actually end up] buying much more.

Ryssdal: Are all of these things, the signage and the false scarcity and the branding and all this neuroscience, are they enough to help retailers in the economy that this country and a lot of the rest of the world is in right now?

Lindstrom: No, it's not. They will struggle no matter what. And we will see that this Christmas is probably going to be the worst in 24 years. And I thinkg the main reason why is because the first time ever we are realizing this is serious stuff. This time it's almost like we got a slap on the chin. And when that slap on the chin, and we know that from neuroscience, people wake up and they start to say, "Hey, I have to buy stuff differently." And what happens is people literally change stores, people literally change the path down the supermarket aisle. And they have never done that before, but that is the change we are facing right now, and retailers are realizing that.

Ryssdal: Martin Lindstrom, his book is called "Buyology: The Truth and Lies About Why We Buy." Martin, thanks a lot.

They were so certain they had a winner. In the early 1980s, Coca-Cola spent $4 million conducting nearly 200,000 taste tests and interviews in an attempt to gauge consumer reaction to a sweeter formulation of its century-old soft drink. The data was unequivocal: Consumers preferred the new formula 8% more than Pepsi and an astonishing 20% more than the original Coca-Cola recipe. But none of that would matter. People simply didn't want New Coke, and the resulting product quickly became the greatest marketing disaster of all time. Company president Donald Keogh summed it up thusly: "All the time and money and skill poured into consumer research on the new Coca-Cola could not measure or reveal the deep and abiding emotional attachment to the original Coca-Cola felt by so many people."

That emotional attachment we feel toward certain products and brands is something marketers are dying to understand. They're forever trying to get inside our heads, and they've recently turned to neuroscience for help. Researchers dabbling in "neuromarketing" make use of technology like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to delve into our minds like never before. It works like this: By measuring blood flow at more than 100,000 locations in the brain and watching the output on an fMRI scanner, scientists can get a pretty good idea of how your brain is processing information. Just last year, a team from MIT, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon made a real breakthrough when they were able to correctly predict which combinations of products and prices would get their subjects to buy a product. All they had to do was watch a group of neurons in the forebrain called the nucleus accumbens (the same portion of the brain that gets turned on when we anticipate a financial gain) and wait for them to light up on the scanner.

A few companies had already been experimenting with this technology. In 2002, scientists working for DaimlerChrysler found that fMRIs could give them a better understanding of how men reacted to cars. In one study, subjects were presented with images of car grilles, and a part of their brains called the fusiform face area (the portion of the temporal lobe that allows us to recognize faces) was triggered. It was later hypothesized that one of the reasons BMW's Mini Cooper had been selling so well was that, at least subconsciously, it had an "adorable face." Furthermore, when drivers were shown pictures of high-performance cars, particularly the Ferrari 360 Modena and the BMW Z8, the areas of the brain associated with concepts of wealth and social dominance were excited. No focus group or survey could ever pick up such a pure and unguarded emotional response.

Martin Lindstrom has spent most of the last 20 years travelling the globe, helping steer the course of such brands as Disney, Pepsi, McDonald's and American Express. According to him, the problem with traditional market research (that is, surveys) is that it relies on people being honest and accurate in their answers. Why would people lie? Any number of reasons. They may be attempting to appear more affluent, cultured or educated than they really are. They may be trying to please or impress the researcher by giving what they believe to be a "correct" answer, or, quite possibly, they are simply unable to articulate how they really feel about a product.

"Surveys and focus groups force people to pass everything they think and feel through a rational verbalization filter," says Lindstrom. "Neuromarketing taps into the 85% of our mind that is unconscious. Try asking someone: Why do you love your wife? Give me three bullet-point answers. It's ridiculous. Yet that is exactly what we're doing when we ask people why they love their iPod."

In 2004, Lindstrom directed the largest neuromarketing study ever conducted. The project lasted three years and involved the work of 200 researchers, 10 professors, and over 2,000 subjects in the U.S., England, Germany, Japan and China who volunteered to have their brains scanned. Lindstrom outlines the results of this study in his book, Buyology, released earlier this month. One of the most fascinating chapters details an experiment that underscores just how powerful some brands have become. A group of people who deem themselves devout were shown a series of religious symbols as well as a number of consumer products, ranging from pints of Guinness to Harley-Davidson motorcycles. The products of particularly powerful brands, researchers noted, lit up the same areas of the brain-just as strongly-as the images of crosses, rosary beads, Mother Teresa, the Virgin Mary and the Bible.

The chances that a machine could help a company make a product so good and so satisfying that using it becomes a quasi-religious experience are slim. Still, there are some who feel that having this much insight into the way we think is simply too much power to put in the hands of marketers. CommercialAlert, the consumer protection organization founded by Ralph Nader, calls neuromarketing "Orwellian" and claims that it will lead to ever more marketing-related diseases such as obesity, diabetes and alcoholism. They find it offensive that one of the world's greatest medical inventions is being used to sell goods, rather than help people.

Martin Lindstrom is unwilling to cede the moral high ground. In his book's introduction, he writes, "The more companies know about our subconscious needs and desires, the more useful, meaningful products they will bring to market. ...Imagine more products that earn more money and satisfy customers at the same time. That's a nice combo." Neuromarketing isn't mind control; it's market research, and it remains to be seen whether it can help companies avoid disasters like New Coke in the future. After all, the functional MRI is merely a descriptive technology. It's like the difference between a weather map and a climate model: The map can tell you where it's raining, but not why it rains. And that's not going to change any time soon. The brain is still a far more complicated machine than we understand.

Globe and Mail on stands October 31, 2008

Sex in advertising is overrated as a catalyst for selling products. Sometimes it boosts sales, but often it actually diverts attention from the product. That is one of the plethora of counterintuitive findings served up by marketing guru Martin Lindstrom in this thought-provoking examination of the thought processes that propel consumer behavior. Among the other marketing issues examined by Lindstrom are the continuing use of subliminal advertising, despite governmental bans against it, and how some companies adopt techniques derived from religion to promote ritualistic consumer behavior. Much conventional wisdom is debunked in these pages.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram on stands November 3, 2008

Oftentimes, sex doesn't sell anything other than itself, according to Martin Lindstrom's recently released book "Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy." His research found that a racy ad can often distract someone from a product altogether.

Lindstrom used MRI exams on more than 2,000 people to observe how they reacted to certain ads, and found that advertising myths like the one that "sex sells" can have unintended consequences for a company. More often than not, it's the consumer who's being fooled, he said.

Negative campaigns like anti-smoking billboards and commercials can help sell the very product they're warning against, Lindstrom said, driving people to crave tobacco because of a link formed in the brain between the message and the pleasure of smoking.

"These warnings are having the complete opposite effect of what people expect," Lindstrom said, noting that tobacco companies often fund anti-smoking campaigns. "When we see these warnings we let our critical guard down, making us even more vulnerable to this strategic advertising. It's manipulative, really."

Wondering whether you've been persuaded to buy something recently? It could be in a simple ritual. The next time you slide a slice of lime down the neck of your bottle of Corona, or patiently wait for the foamy head of your Guinness to settle, consider why you think it makes your beer more enjoyable. According to Lindstrom, both practices originated as marketing strategies.

"There are subliminal messages and pressures in everything we see and smell," Lindstrom said. "We're affected by advertising in everything we do."

Associated Press from November 11, 2008

When he was walking around Tokyo’s Shibuya district this year, marketing consultant Martin Lindstrom got a text message from Starbucks on his cell phone saying, “Martin, one of your friends is in the area. Would you like to meet him?”

After failing to spot anyone familiar, Lindstrom responded that he would like to meet the friend. Starbucks answered, telling him, “Starbucks would like to sponsor your meeting. He is at the nearest Starbucks, one-and-a-half minutes away and we’ll give you a free cup of coffee.” When Lindstrom arrived at the coffee shop, his friend was indeed waiting. “I didn’t know he was in town,” he recalled. Both had signed up for track-a-friend connections.

It’s this kind of product placement — contextual product placement “where the brand helps me to become a hero” — that is likely to emerge as the “number-one marketing tool” inside 10 years, predicted Lindstrom, author of newly published “Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy” (Doubleday, $24.95).

If things unfold the way the 38-year-old, globe-trotting native of Copenhagen anticipates, the marketing landscape worldwide will have changed significantly. Lindstrom pans product placement as the least effective form of marketing, working about 1 percent of the time. “We are hardwired to be seduced by stories,” he said, noting our brains “filter” out brand images that are randomly or commercially dropped into a story where they play no role. “What does the brain say about that? It says, ‘Forget about that. It’s destroying my story line and I can’t cope.’”

Most of this could be happening without our even knowing about it. Based on his research for “Buyology” — functional MRI- and EEG-like brain scans of what stimulates craving, status seeking and other responses in 2,000 people — Lindstrom contends that 85 percent of what we do is prompted by subconscious triggers. While we may think we’ve bought a shirt or gone to a concert for one reason or another, the author suggests otherwise. “It’s not that we mean to lie — it’s just that our unconscious minds are a lot better interpreting our behavior [including why we buy],” he writes.

Though marketing to evoke particular brain responses may elicit images of the thought police, the way Lindstrom sees it, his findings mean that roughly 85 percent of marketing money is being wasted. Last year, that amounted to about $99 billion of the $117 billion he estimates was spent on marketing products in the U.S., including advertising, packaging and displays. He would also throw in another $10 billion wasted on the market research.

What is working is advertising of the subliminal variety. “Subliminal advertising, hate it or love it, is much more powerful than anything else I’ve seen,” Lindstrom said. “It is probably the reason we have 17 million shopaholics in [the U.S.]. People have built whole lives around the entertainment of shopping, rather than entertaining themselves.”

With mirror neurons that incline us to mimic the actions of others, and the feel-good dopamine rush that accompanies buying something, consumers may be easy marks for marketers that can play to those impulses.

Take Abercrombie & Fitch, for example. “As the clerk rings up and bags your purchases in that beautiful black-and-white Abercrombie bag tattooed with bare-chested models, you’re feeling cool, you’re feeling gorgeous — you’re feeling like one of ‘them,’” Lindstrom wrote in his book. “[This] produces a feeling the brain automatically links back to the models [hired to hang out] outside, the fragrant and pervasive smell, and the late-night atmosphere of the store itself….You’re taking home a little bit of that popularity with you.”

Or, at the least, one’s nucleus accumbens — the “craving spot” around the head’s temple — may have been triggered. The author-consultant himself believes he has experienced this. While tooling around in the Second Life Web site one evening, he saw a Pizza Hut storefront with a sun rising behind it appear in the virtual community on his computer screen. The dawn of a new day? No, simply a pizza promptly ordered by Lindstrom and delivered to his home, about a half hour later.

WWD Lifestyle on stands November 12, 2008

CONSUMER CULTURE: Never mind the retail slowdown: the marketing guru Martin Lindstrom’s “Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy” enters the hardcover nonfiction list at No. 11, on the strength of wisdom like “Sex doesn’t sell” and “The robin’s egg blue of a certain famous jewelry brand significantly raises women’s heart rates.”

Tell that last one to Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who make their debut at No. 16 on the hardcover nonfiction list with “Influence,” a snapshot-heavy tribute to 23 of the “creative, dynamic and wonderfully bizarre” people in their lives, including themselves.

I’ve always had trouble telling the twins apart, but the jacket copy helpfully points out that Mary-Kate is an “actress, designer and entrepreneur,” while Ashley is a “designer, entrepreneur, actress and style icon.” Got it.

New York Times on November 14, 2008

Right now, Martin Lindstrom (author of the new book "Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy") says, most retailers are playing the "fear factor" game, trying to convince customers that whatever discount they are offering won't be available for long.

"They're saying, 'We have a special offer here, but this is only a limited offer for the next two hours or else you'll totally miss this opportunity," notes Lindstrom, a marketing guru who's advised executives at companies like McDonald's, Microsoft and Disney.

His advice: Unless you're in the market for recession-proof items (such as toys and food), hang on to your money for another month or so.

"This is going to be one of the most shocking holiday seasons in decades," he says, predicting that the Dec. 15 price-drop will be driven by retailers so desperate to meet their numbers that customers who are in the loop will be able to cash in big-time.

"I estimate that the offers coming from retail this year will be 20%-30% better than they were last year," he says. "We are going to see some of the most amazing offers ever seen."

High-priced products, he says, will have the most drastic drops. The categories that will witness gigantic discounts include audio equipment, flat-panel TVs and Blu-ray DVD players, he believes: "I would not be surprised if we witness discounts of up to 50% within these categories. Home decoration and other higher-priced items will see a price drop almost similar to those."

What's more, he cautions, don't plan your holiday vacation just yet.

"We are also likely to see some fabulous price drops within the travel industry — amazing accommodation packages and last-minute offerings," he says. "And you'll be swamped in spa offers and other luxury packages which simply won't sell. Do not book your ticket now — take the chance and wait and see. I'm almost 100% sure that you'll grab a fantastic deal after Dec. 15."

There are items, however, worth snatching up now.

"The only categories where we won't see major drops in prices will be the toy categories and certain food items," Lindstrom says. "So if there is a special toy you want to buy your kids — and the price already is at a low level — buy it now, as this may very well be ripped away by other parents in similar situations."

So play your cards right, and you'll come out on top.

"In reality, you're the one with the best card in your hand because you're the one with the money," Lindstrom says. "Consumers should remember that."

New York Daily News on stands November 17th 2008

IF ADVERTISERS CONTINUE to pare their spending as the economy slows, they'll have to learn how to do more with less. In Martin Lindstrom's new book Buyology, the marketing guru tries to get to the bottom of what works and what doesn't by using scientific studies to observe buyer behavior 90% of which he says is driven by our unconscious minds.

COCKTAIL PARTY FODDER: In one of Lindstrom's studies, smokers linked to an MRI machine first looked at images associated with different cigarette brands cowboys, camels and then at logos of actual cigarette companies. The subjects' brains responded more strongly to the symbolic images than to the others, suggesting logos aren't necessarily marketers' most powerful tools. Also: Lindstrom gave Tiffany's boxes to 600 women and found their heart rates went up 20% when they received them. One look at its distinctive robin's-egg blue color, Lindstrom found, triggered thoughts and anxiety about marriage, weddings, and raising a family.

FORTUNE on stands November 24, 2008

The first day of "Idol" champion David Cook's post-show career began with a very positive sign: His album debuted in the top position on the iTunes top albums chart — sweeping aside not just his Season 7 opponent David Archuleta but also the formidable marketplace powers of Taylor Swift, the "Twilight" soundtrack, Beyonce, Britney and Nickelback. Idol Nation anxiously awaits the arrival of hard numbers on both Davids' sales with upcoming charts, but in the meantime this bodes well for a singer who less than a year ago, in the opening days of the top 24, was given less a chance of winning than the guy who worked the backstage coat room. He was the singer whom judge Cowell dismissed out of hand, saying he had zero charisma.

But coming out of nowhere during Season 7, Cook owned the Idoldome as no one has since Season 4's Carrie Underwood. Often called the smartest of contestants, Cook showed the rare ability to learn as he went along, to shape himself for the competition and to consistently turn in the show-stopping, history-making performances that bond "Idol" audiences with their performers forever, building a fan base that stretched from a hard-core cougar following to a tween movement that at times rivaled that of the Chosen One himself, David Archuleta. And now, he belongs to the world.

Best of luck to the boy from Tulsa. The rest of the day's "Idol" news is after the jump.

While David Cook uncorks the bubbly, there must be some long faces tonight around the executive suites of the Ford Motor Co. — and not just because of the looming shadow of bankruptcy hanging over the car maker. No, far more consequential to Idol Nation are the results of a study by Martin Lindstrom just published in AdAge. A practitioner of neuro-marketing, the scientific study of how brain waves that react to advertising, Lindstrom used "Idol" as the platform on which to stage a test of his theory that in the modern media world, where consumers are bombarded with marketing messages, the brain finds ways to shut out many television sponsorships to defend itself from being overwhelmed and having no room left for individual thought.

In the study, 2,000 people were shown a sequence of "Idol" clips, and then brain scans were used to see how well each recalled the involvement of "Idol's" three major sponsors: Coke, Cingular (now AT&T) and Ford. "Idol" was selected because of the high level of integration of the products into the fabric of the show. For Coke and Cingular, Lindstrom found, the level of recall was fairly high, with red-Co